O Intermitente (So long, farewell, auf weidersehen, good-bye)

segunda-feira, setembro 22, 2003

Mitos Ambientais

1. The "Rights" of Future Generations no TCS. Acerca do problemas decorrentes da instituição de quotas de poluição e do aumento dos custos de produção pelo Protocolo de Kyoto.

instituting quotas has the same, fatal flaw as any other form of central planning. It rests on the assumption that the government knows better. Better than the plethora of market operations, which deals with conscious decisions every day in the realm of economic life. Knowledge, as Nobel Prize winner Friedrich von Hayek demonstrated, is spread through society and cannot be centralized in any superior bureaucratic body. Central planning can never be efficient; in economic terms, it cannot produce the best allocation of resources, since the order such planning intends to create simply cannot exist outside the continuously evolving context resulting from the independent and competitive actions of many. Solutions to problems such as global warming cannot arise if not from the efforts of free individuals who put their creativity and genius at the service of others -- albeit for self-interest -- and who therefore create the opportunity for a better and wealthier future.

After all, the only "right" of future generations that we may conceive of is that our sons and daughters deserve to receive from our hands a wealthier and freer world than the one we inherited from our forbearers. A world where capitalism has been eradicated, and the price of innovation and progress has become too high to be ever met, will be neither wealthier nor freer.

First and foremost, people assert we know a lot about glaciers, but we don't. We know next to nothing about glacial activity, but what we do know suggests there are as many expanding glaciers as there are shrinking ones (this even happens with two glaciers within a few miles of each other) and that there is no universal trend either way. There are more than 160,000 glaciers on the planet. Scientists have good, long-term (20-year or more) mass balance measurements on a comparative handful of them.

We are also probably years away from knowing how glaciers contribute to the recorded sea level rise of the last century. Braithwaite and Raper noted last year that "the temperature sensitivity of sea level rise depends upon the global distribution of glacier areas, the temperature sensitivity of glacier mass balance in each region, the expected change of climate in each region, and changes in glacier geometry resulting from climate change." They concluded that "none of these are particularly well known at present," because "glacier areas, altitudes, shape characteristics and mass balance sensitivity are still not known for many glacierized regions and ways must be found to fill gaps." Filling in the gaps in scientific knowledge "will probably take a decade of work by many different groups in a number of disciplines."

Another recent study looked at 67 glaciers in North America and found that glacial melting from the 50s to the 70s contributed about 0.14mm per year to sea-level rise (give or take 30 percent). More detailed measurements of 28 glaciers from the mid-1990s to 2001, when extrapolated to the rest of Alaska, yield a sea-level rise of 0.27mm per year. The authors note that these glaciers "form the largest glaciological contribution to rising sea level yet measured." Yet even at this record rate it will take 90 years for sea level to rise 1 inch. Moreover, the authors did not take account of the Great Pacific Climate Shift that took place, as is well documented, in '76-77. The rising rate is much more likely explained by that than by global warming.

"A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom."F.A.Hayek